I recently have been working through my family tree as well. Just one or two generations back and it seems to be very common to have 8-12 children. My own mother had 13 brothers and sisters.
And I do find the girls often got married off at a very young age.
Oddly, I am starting to believe teen girls/boys back then were far more mature than what we have today. They knew a lot from being planters or farmers and they also had engrained in them a work ethic and family values, plus a healthy dose of religion.
Somewhere along the line in our culture...it became far more important to keep a child immature and we see that result in the number of “adult children” still living at home in their parent’s basement. I do very much use the term “adult children” and I see it up close nearly everyday in my work.
Grown “kids” still living at home. I show up to take the dog for the daily walk. Every day at several homes there is an ‘adult child’ home watching TV, playing games etc. Why are the parents paying a dogwalker several hundred dollars a month to walk the dog? The only answer I can come up with is because the adult child can’t handle the simplest of responsibility.
Personally I agree it is an amazing culture change when one considers the bigger picture.
And consider some of the recent gun shooting reports...characterizing these young adults and "children" to the point of even using photos several years back.
If they keep this generation 'immature' and the culture viewing them as some sort of innocents...then the elites have every reason to exert control over them.
I did some tree investigation during an ancestry.com free period. I met my grandfather’s sister and four brothers when I was a kid. The 1880 census revealed that he was one of 11 children. I had never heard of the five that died in infancy.
I, too do a lot of genealogy research. I’m certain young people of that time did tend to be more mature. But their lives were not as complex as ours are today. Yes, many married and did not stay in the parental home. On the other hand, they often stayed in the parental home until marriage, those that did not marry often stayed indefinitely, as well as widows/widowers and their children moving back in with the grandparents.
An eighth grade exam was posted a while back. Most of today's university students could not pass it.
“Oddly, I am starting to believe teen girls/boys back then were far more mature than what we have today.”
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Oddly? Oddly? What on Earth is odd? I think it is as obvious as the sunrise that people of any age back then were far more mature than those of the same age today, especially the very young. We consider people children at an age when they used to be expected to act like adults. One of the strangest things I have heard recently was a woman expressing to my wife that she thinks young children are more mature now than in the past. I asked my wife later and she said she considered that view to be as strange as I thought it was.
I have commented many times online about how I went straight from high school to Navy boot camp, went to Navy electronics school, got my honorable discharge just before my twenty first birthday and went to work. At twenty three I was an honorably discharged vet with a job that paid the equivalent of more than sixty thousand a year in today’s dollars and I was driving a new Mustang I bought for myself. Was I considered a success? No, I was considered a hopeless failure because I was still single! That is how much things have changed. Now people keep their “children” on their insurance until the age of twenty six. Good grief, twenty six used to be middle age. There used to be plenty of grandmothers who were not yet thirty. There are plenty of thirty five and forty year old children running around now who show no signs of any desire to ever grow up.